The theory goes a little something like this. The human body naturally burns more calories each day to maintain a pound of muscle than it does to maintain a pound of fat. Therefore, the more muscle you build, the more calories your body will naturally burn each day at rest.

Which means, just by building muscle, you’ll significantly increase your metabolism and turn your body into a calorie burning, fat melting machine… and this will obviously improve your overall fat loss progress.

To get to the root of the problem, you need to understand how many calories muscle actually burns. Depending on where you get your diet and fitness information from, you may come across the suggestion that 1 pound of muscle burns as much as 25, or 50, or even 100 additional calories per day.

If this were true, then building 5lbs of muscle would lead to as much as 500 extra calories being burned by your body per day, and this would indeed be a huge increase to your metabolism that would indeed have a significant positive effect on your ability to burn fat.